Adventures in Womanhood

I’m at that age?

I have a confession to make: I spend an inordinate amount of my time on WordPress reading Mommy Blogs.

Something about these women’s stories of impending newborns, irate toddlers and cute kid moments just tugs at my heart strings and keeps me coming back for more. Is my biological alarm clock going off? Can I tell it to sleep for a couple more years?

I was chatting with a friend last night about how we kids in medical school are still waiting for our lives to start. I’ve talked about this issue before – dealing with friends who are now married, have kids, have jobs. But frankly it only gets worse the closer we get to our graduation date. Spending five years in university is an anomaly compared to everyone else. The girls now in first year on MSH are the same girls I will be graduating with in three years time. The cohort I entered university with is graduating next year. The math is all wrong.

Maybe that’s what my ovaries are trying to tell me by turning up the oestrogen and inducing this hunger for maternal information, secondhand or otherwise. Am I at the age when all I should be thinking about is starting a family? Curse you, my feminine body parts!

I have joined the ranks of (modern) women who put careers over kids, and financial independence over families. I’m not a fanatic feminist (okay, I’ll quit with the alliteration) but I recognize and appreciate the importance of having a good amount of stability in my life before I go complicating it with children. And children are complications, from the moment of their conception til the moment you move on to the afterlife. Cute, cocky, charming, frustrating complications.

So for now I’ll sate my totally irrational (but psychologically valid) instinct for nesting with stories of actual mamas dealing with their awesome, scary children.

This Mommy Blog fixation probably started with the friends I had on Livejournal, because all of them had kids and would tell stories about them in between the stories they shared about Harry Potter. So I blame Harry Potter.